We Need to Talk about Kevin

I have pondered a lot over the past days whether to write or not about Kevin Spacey. I have been, and still am, a huge fan. I am also a public relations professional and a woman who has, like pretty much every other woman in Eastern European Romania, seen and experienced her fair share of sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour.

I have read in horror all the witness stories written about Harvey Weinstein and empathised, just like everyone else with a pulse and a heart in the right place, with those who have been pushed around, denied roles, threatened or molested by a bully in a position of power.

But somehow, in my book, nothing that has been so far written about Kevin Spacey registers in the same way. I hear people who have been bothered by a massage in an age where sexual partners are chosen on Tinder. I hear vertically moral people bothered by a blow job in a gay bar in a country where this happens pretty much every year.

I see a world class career destroyed in a matter of days in a whirlwind of social media where anonymous comments evoke shady incidents that are literally from the last century. I see that a theatre – which has been brought back to glory from rubble and disarray by Spacey and endowed with a humongous amount of money not two years ago – is trying to ride the publicity wave by opening a “confidential email address” where people are encouraged to spill the beans on Kevin Spacey.

Leaving aside the preposterous notion of anonymous email messages or confidential email addresses, two concepts that would work today only for crass computer illiterates, the headline that this poor gang of gossipers gets in Vanity Fair says it all “Kevin Spacey’s Former Theatre Has Opened a Confidential Tip Line”. Sorry, Old Vic, for the American audiences you still are and will be Kevin Spacey’s former theatre…

I see Spacey fired, blamed, his work discarded, his awards withdrawn, his strong and, I am sure, overbearing personality condemned at every step, and yet I saw no outrage of such caliber two years ago when this came to light. Not the first time, mind you, but the third or the fourth time in ten years…

I see now Masterclass is cancelling his class on acting, Kevin Spacey being the main reason I had learned about Masterclass.com in the first place. I wonder when Dustin Hoffman will also get the axe judging by the same weird wave of morality that suddenly got into us…

I read his PR advisors and publicists are deserting him right now and trying to put some distance – and I remember all the glorious campaigns and ideas that surrounded “House of Cards” or The Old Vic every single year… I was in awe of all that… and frankly, I am disgusted by all this…

I see all this happening in a country lead by Donald Trump… I see all this happening to one of the great friends of Bill Clinton… forgive me if I really feel this is off…

I can’t rule out the possibility that I might be horribly wrong. The private lives of individuals cannot be judged objectively by outsiders. You can never know all the inner details of a crisis situation as long as you are not in the room… But I would have felt extremely hypocritical if I had not written this. Kevin Spacey was the one to make me come to London and experience world class theatre for years and years and years… He left me in awe following his performances in Richard III, Inherit the Wind, Clarence Darrow, The Usual Suspects, but also for The Life of David Gale. He left me in tears after the wildly emotional speech he delivered the night before leaving The Old Vic as a Creative Director.

This is none of my business and yet it is… cause if we start throwing shit at people and destroy careers based on gossip and we all agree that this is somehow ok, who’s gonna say who the next target is and who’s gonna wait and analyse and judge (I mean really judge) whether it was warranted or not…

Oh, and if you are looking for good movies to watch, you should try this one sometime…

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑